Open Access publishing funding stream ends May 15

May 9, 2020

After five years of successfully supporting faculty publications, VCU Libraries’ Open Access Publishing Fund will be decommissioned May 15. VCU authors can apply for funding up to that date. It is possible that the fund will be exhausted before May 15.

After then, funding from VCU Libraries will no longer be available to subsidize authors’ article processing charges (APCs). The fund is being decommissioned because while this funding has helped to support the publication of more than 100 open access articles, it is not a sustainable or scalable model that will foster strategic changes in the traditional scholarly publication ecosystem. In fact, more than 50 percent of funded APCs were paid to the five large commercial publishers -- Sage, Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Springer -- which continued at the same time to charge significant subscription fees in addition to enjoying APC revenue for open access journal articles. VCU Libraries joins a growing number of research libraries, including the University of Virginia, that have discontinued open access fund subsidies for these reasons.

VCU Libraries will continue its arrangements in support of VCU authors who pay APCs for open access publishing in journals from these publishers:

Wiley journals

Article processing charges for fully open access Wiley journals are covered by the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA), Virginia’s academic library consortium. VCU faculty and graduate students are eligible. To qualify, a VCU author must be listed as the corresponding author of a primary research or review article. When submitting an article to the manuscript submission system,look up and enter VCU’s account code when prompted (the current code is V044). View the author workflow and more information inVIVA’s Wiley Agreement FAQ.

Royal Society of Chemistry

Included in the library’s subscription to RSC journals is the provision that APC charges for up to 18 VCU authored articles will be covered each year of the agreement. For calendar year 2019, 14 VCU authored articles accepted for publication were published OA under this agreement.

VCU Libraries continues to advance open access through institutional memberships, library collections, consortia, outreach and Scholars Compass.Contact us if you are interested in how VCU Libraries can open up your work to a wider world of readers and increased impact.